Alice Walker

Black History Month – February 9, 1944

“I think it pisses God off  if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” – Shug 

Alice Malsenior Walker was born on this day in 1944. A novelist, poet, and activist, she is responsible for bringing “The Color Purple,” into our lives, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Walker was born in Putnam County, Georgia, the youngest of eight children, to African-American sharecroppers Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant. Living under Jim Crow laws, Walker’s parents resisted landlords who expected the children of black sharecroppers to work in the fields.  A white plantation owner said to her that black people had “no need for education”. Minnie Lou Walker, according to her daughter, replied “You might have some black children somewhere, but they don’t live in this house. Don’t you ever come around here again talking about how my children don’t need to learn how to read and write.” Her mother enrolled Alice in first grade when the girl was four years old. After high school, Walker went to Spelman College in Atlanta on a full scholarship in 1961 and later transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, graduating in 1966. Walker was strongly affected by becoming pregnant and having an abortion in the summer of 1965 before her senior year of college. She became severely depressed and determined to commit suicide. She struggled out of this experience by writing poems, which were published as Once (1968), her first book of poetry. In the late 1970s Walker moved to northern California and in 1982, she published what has become her best-known work, The Color Purple. The novel follows a young troubled black woman fighting her way through not just racist white culture but patriarchal black culture as well. The book became a bestseller and was subsequently adapted into a critically acclaimed 1985  movie directed by Steven Spielberg featuring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg.

Alice Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. when she was a student at Spelman College in the early 1960s. She credits King for her decision to return to the American South as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement. She took part in the 1963 March on Washington. Later, she volunteered to register black voters in Georgia and Mississippi. Through her involvement in civil rights activism, Walker met the New York City-born Jewish lawyer Melvyn Leventhal. Following their marriage in 1967, they became the first legally married interracial couple to live in Mississippi. The two had one daughter, Rebecca. They divorced in 1976. Her books have been translated into more than two dozen languages and sold more than 15 million copies. Along with her Pulitzer and National Book Award, Walker has been honored with the O. Henry Award and the Mahmoud Darwish Literary Prize for Fiction. She was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2006 and received the LennonOno Peace Award in 2010. In 2013, she was the subject of the acclaimed documentary Alice Walker: Beauty In Truth.